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Great Daring Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan September 28, 2020 31 min

Josip Broz Tito - World War II — Yugoslav partisans wading across a river. Wikimedia

14. A Daring Train-Jacking

It was early 1862, during the American Civil War. Union forces were worried about the possibility of Confederate troops rapidly arriving at Chattanooga from Atlanta, using the Western & Atlantic Railroad (W&R). James J. Andrews, a Union civilian scout, proposed a daring raid to sever that rail connection. He and a select group of volunteers would seize a locomotive in Georgia, then travel north, destroying two connecting railway lines and their vital bridges along the way.

Andrews’ idea was approved, and in early April, 1862, he recruited Union Army volunteers for his raid. Slipping through Confederate lines in civilian clothes, the men rendezvoused in Marietta, Georgia. There, they boarded a train on April 11^th. When it reached a small stop called “Big Shanty”, selected by Andrews because it had no telegraph that the Confederates could use to send out an alarm, the raiders leaped into action. Seizing the locomotive, named the General, they uncoupled it from the rest of the train and took off. It was the start of a rollicking chase.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.